So way back when Gnome was pretty new and there were not a lot of applets, around the middle of 1999, I got a book at Linux World on Developing GTK applications. I then took the Slashdot applet source and the idea behind this Perl application that was available at the time called “quote” and created the first version of the Gnome Stock ticker. I then post it to the Gnome site. They had this contributions area where you could post links to Gnome related projects. Well, it soon got a LOT of downloads, I was pretty surprised, but then again it was the middle of the Dot Com boom and Stocks were on everyone minds (including mine and that is why I made the thing in the first place, to watch my own stocks.)

Soon afterwards I was starting to get emails with suggestions for features. Some good, some crazy and then I got two with actual CODE ATTACHED! These turned out to be from Linux/GTK hackers Jim Garrison and Rached Blili. They were interested in continuing to work on it and so I added them to the authors and we were three. Rached hosted the site where we would distribute it from (still alive: http://www.dread.net/gtik/ ) and the three of us all added things for a while.

Then Jim, who had some contact with other Gnome developers, got us accepted into the Gnome source tree and repository. That is when trouble started for me. It start to get harder and harder to build and to add features or fix bugs. Also at this time, the Dot Com boom was starting to become the Dot Com Bomb and I was changing Dot Com jobs quite a bit and pretty busy, so I ended up getting away from the Gtik development. Jim and Rached pretty much did it all for a while. Then we lost contact with Jim, and after that Rached got real busy too and we all pretty much stopped doing much with the Ticker.

Well some time pass and emails stopped coming in. I went to Linux World one day around that time and it was pretty cool to see out ticker running on most of the desktops in the vendor booths, on all kinds of platforms. Even Sun’s booth had us running. You would see it in the presentations, on the big screens, and even touted as a feature by the presenter: “watch your stocks with GNOME”. I was not getting any email from Gtik users at that time so I thought all was well and people were happy with it as it was. But seeing it at Linux World made me want to work on it again and I set out to do something with it that I had always wanted to do: make it able to use ANY site, and to allow the user to create templates for parsing their favorite site (the app to that point only used Yahoo Finance for it’s data source). The idea was that the user would create a template for parsing the data from their favorite finance site and they would load this template with the URL to their site and maintain that themselves. I put several nights into that development on the last source tree I had on my machine at the time (though it was terribly out of date I would soon find.) So I finished that work and was pretty proud of myself. It was pretty slick and I could use gtik with ANY site I wanted. I had templates for Yahoo and Quote.com and ETrade at that time. THEN, THE END FOR ME.

I went to add this latest change to the source tree, and logged into my account at Gnome CVS. Well I thought I should get the latest source and edit that with my changes and then re-upload. Well …. something was strange. The source tree looked quite different than when I had last seen it. So I took a look in the change log. Boy, people were busy. I found that a LOT of other developers had started maintaing the code and had port the whole thing to Gnome 2.0 which I found was quite different than what we were working with before. I could not even figure out how to set up the development environment at first then I found NONE OF MY MACHINES could even run the new Gnome nicely, it was a very heavy application, and I had all these 486s and early Pentiums at the time. So I just gave up. I had no time as it was and could not spend time to learn about Gnome 2.x and get new hardware to do it.

Well, so there it is; my silly history of the Gnome Stock Ticker out there for all to see. For me, I am probably done with it (UPDATE: Gnome later changed their applet framework and the ticker was killed and the rest of this post was written before so it might seem out of place ), though my name is still associated with it. It had it ups, but more downs.

One cool thing I’ll never forget was that the person that emailed me my login and password for CVS was Miguel de Icaza himself. That was pretty cool. I later got to be able to build the thing and I did do a few little little changes for people that were using the old version for some reason and needed something added, but I am not contributing to the CVS source and not sure if I ever will. If I had it all to do over, I would not have asked to have it put into Gnome’s source tree and would have kept it pretty simple, but such is life.

So… if your looking to suggest features, here is a list of the people that are working on it lately. This is just the email entries from the Change Log at http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-applets/gtik/ . I suggest you download the change log before email any of these people, as some are doing translation work and others are coding GUI and others still are coding other things like Gnome API updates and such.

Starting up my new trusty friend the iPad to record something with Garageband this morning, (a lil piece of a tune that just popped into my head that I did not want to loose) I found all of the apps that I had purchased or downloaded from the Apple app store would not launch. The icon would move and the screen would go black for a part of a second and then nothing. So the guitar was set aside and a trawl in iOS forums began. Needless to say I have pretty much now forgotten what it was that I had come up with before grabbing the tablet.

Anyway, the forums were helpful somewhat, in that they eventually guided me towards the right direction, but none of the solutions for this issue discussed what the problem was exactly. There are however a lot of: “well I tried everything and after doing …. it suddenly start working”. While some of the solutions I found were teaching me tricks on the iPad, like removing apps from memory, doing a hard reboot etc., most of the “…” were various process for removing and reinstalling apps via wifi or 3G (not iTunes they said). I was desperate and decided to try this. I use iTunes to install apps and decided to go that route even though the posts said not to. There it was that I hit on the issue my own: “I just tried … and it start working” and I did not have to remove any apps. For me it had to do with Authorization (I think). I did get a new app from the iTunes store, but then before doing much else, iTunes start complaining that my desktop machine was not authorized to play content purchased with this machine. It had always been before, and I do not know what could have changed the status of the machine but it was so. Reauthorizing the machine or in iTunes eyes authorizing it at all, as it thought it had never been, did the trick. After that all my apps were fine again.

I do not know how it happened but something during a sync caused the machine or my apple account to forget about the connection between these two machines.

So before deleting and reinstalling apps etc. try syncing with iTunes, and choosing the Store menu

and either deauthorize and authorize or authorize as needed, then see if you can use your apps again. If it is still not working, then hit the iPad forums and start installing or reinstalling apps, or find your own “I just did … and it start working” process (and let me know via comments what your “…” was for next time please)

]]>https://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/apple-ipad-tablet-apps-wont-open-launch-after-sync/feed/16Jaysonipad-apps-authorizationiTunes Store MenuGoogle Timelinehttps://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/google-timeline/
https://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/google-timeline/#respondSat, 28 May 2011 17:30:54 +0000http://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/?p=239]]>Just discovered a cool feature of google search. I am sure I am the last person to find it, as I am usually a bit behind, but well … here it is anyway. Google has a nice Timeline view of info about subjects. You can get this by adding a simple parameter and parameter value ( &tbs=tl:1) to the query string.

when searching via Google, after entering your search text and running the search, if you modify the resulting HTTP query string and add in the parameter “tbs” and value “tl:1” , which looks like: “&tbs=tl:1” and rerun that query (different depending on your browser but in most, if you just press the “Enter” key on your keyboard it will run it), you will then see a timeline like:

I will be speaking about rNews, the new standard from the IPTC for embedding metadata in on-line news content, at the upcoming SemTech conference in San Francisco. The session is Wednesday, June 8, 2011
09:45 AM – 10:35 PM. Here is the abstract for the talk:

rNews: Embedding Metadata in On-line News

The IPTC, a consortium of the world’s major news agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors, recently released rNews, a semantic standard for on-line news. rNews uses RDFa to annotate HTML documents with news-specific metadata, to help with search, ad placement, aggregation and the sharing of on-line news. Jayson Lorenzen, a software engineer with Business Wire and one of the IPTC Member organization delegates working on rNews, will give an overview of the IPTC, the rNews standard, why rNews is needed and how the standard was eventually created. The talk will include use cases and live demonstrations of rNews and will end with a call to action for you to participate; rNews is currently at version 0.5 and the IPTC is looking for feedback on how to improve the standard.

]]>https://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/speaking_at_semtech_2011_about_rnews/feed/0JaysonSpeaker at SemTech 2011Let’s not forget Japanhttps://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/lets-not-forget-japan/
https://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/lets-not-forget-japan/#respondWed, 27 Apr 2011 16:30:24 +0000http://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/?p=220]]>This is a story I created to test Storify (http://storify.com), a site that allows us to create stories by pulling content from many media sites and combining it to be the story you want to tell. View the story “Let’s not forget Japan” on Storify(it looks much better on Storify BTW. They allow for embedding with all their formatting, but it uses Javascript, which wordpress.com strip)

With all the other terrible news these days, information regarding Japan’s recovery efforts could be taking a back seat. Did you see stories about the BP Oil Spill on the anniversary, and were you surprised to hear of the struggles still raging for the people there? Lets not let that happen so fast for Japan.

]]>https://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/lets-not-forget-japan/feed/0JaysonimgNote to self “you cannot use dependency injection in helper classes”https://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/note-to-self-you-cannot-use-dependency-injection-in-helper-classes/
https://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/note-to-self-you-cannot-use-dependency-injection-in-helper-classes/#respondWed, 09 Mar 2011 21:11:02 +0000http://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/note-to-self-you-cannot-use-dependency-injection-in-helper-classes/]]>So after wasting a lot of time fighting against the current, and my desire to use the beautiful and clean dependency injection features in EJB3, I am now using the old messy lookin context lookup for resources in my helper classes.

I saw some post about passing resources, but having issues with threading. Just a note to myself to not try this again.

]]>https://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/install_firefox_java_plugin_on_linux/feed/0Jaysonabout-pluginsUbuntu Linux unable to mount non-journaled hfsplus drive for writehttps://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/linux-unable-to-write-to-non-journaled-hfsplus-drive/
https://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/linux-unable-to-write-to-non-journaled-hfsplus-drive/#commentsMon, 13 Sep 2010 14:45:31 +0000http://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/?p=169]]>I have a drive from a Macbook that I made into a USB drive to share files between Linux and Macs. To do this I of course disabled journaling on the drive before removing it from the Macbook, and all was well. Both Linux (a Debian desktop machine) and various Mac machines could both read and write to the drive. However, I got a new notebook, which I installed Ubuntu ﻿﻿﻿on, and found it could only mount this non-journaled hfsplus USB drive as read only, though “mount” shows it mounted rw, for read and write. I tried many things and read many blogs and forum posts and decided to try the tools that come with in the “hfsprogs” package, and specifically “fsck.hfsplus” as someone speculated that the drive might have been become corrupt during an unmount. The command I ran was:

sudo fsck.hfsplus /dev/sdb2

This check did indeed find some errors and report it had correct them and afterwards I could once again write to the drive.

I hope this helps the next person searching for this issue. I tried to get all the terms I was searching for, unsuccessfully, into title of this post to help folks locate it. Searching for this issue seems to turn up 99.9% responses about “You have to turn off journaling before mounting with Linux” which I knew already and was not part of the problem at all.

]]>https://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/linux-unable-to-write-to-non-journaled-hfsplus-drive/feed/7JaysonUse the Android SDK Emulator with Eclipse behind a Proxyhttps://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/use-the-android-sdk-emulator-with-eclipse-behind-a-proxy/
https://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/use-the-android-sdk-emulator-with-eclipse-behind-a-proxy/#commentsWed, 12 May 2010 21:17:15 +0000http://jaysonlorenzen.wordpress.com/?p=142]]>In the office we have a pretty stern internet proxy and I needed to test something from the Android Emulator using the network today, and therefore the Proxy. This seemed like a simple thing to do, and there are instructions for adding proxy information when launching the Emulator on the Android Developer site (http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/emulator.html#proxy). So I went into preferences for Eclipse, chose the Android preferences and sure enough, on the lunch tab there is a field for parameters when launching the Emulator. I added the proxy string there as per the document (-http-proxy user:pass@server:port) e.g.

but it did not seem to take. A little searching in some forums solved this however. I am adding it here with a title that matches what I was searching for via Google so that the next person can find it without reading a lot of forum threads.

The trick is that you need to add this info on for the project you are going to be running it from, and there is a convenient place to do so in Eclipse. With the project selected, choose “Run” from the menu bar at the top, then “Run Configurations” This will show all the run configurations, and have the current project selected. You can also choose the Run/Configurations items from any project and select the correct one once inside. Once a configuration is chosen, choose the “Target” tab from the tabs on the right side of the Run Configurations dialog and look for the Text field labeled “Additional Emulator Command Line Options”. I had to resize the Dialog window to get this box to appear as there are no scrollpanes used there (I am using Linux version 3.5.2. of Eclipse﻿). Below are a couple screen shots of these dialogs.